Reconstructing a Nineteenth-Century Fantasy: Between Model Composition and Reimagining Improvisation
Gilad Rabinovitch (Queens College, CUNY) 11.6 (November 2025)
Though we tend to perceive classical music as fixed “composers’ compositions,” historical music making and learning in Europe included a great deal of improvisation. This video reports on my creative reconstruction project: a reimagining of a fantasy latent in pedagogical fragments in Carl Czerny’s ([1829] 1983) Systematic Introduction to Improvisation. Czerny’s treatise is uniquely generous in documenting a variety of improvised genres, ranging from serious fantasies to light variations and potpourris on popular tunes. My reconstructed fantasy takes three written-out transformations of a hypothetical audience suggestion and uses them in a multi-movement sonata-fantasia. Though my project—as recorded by pianist Bang-Shyuan Chen—is a composition, not an improvisation, it represents one of the many scholarly and musical paths towards reimagining historical practices. In addition to providing a background on improvisation in this period, I discuss two technical aspects associated with this project—motivic transformation and the large-scale organization of a sonata-fantasia.
Keywords: Carl Czerny, historical improvisation, fantasia, model composition, sonata form